This week, a neighbor told me salmon have migrated to a creek a half-block from my house. Not a creek, really. An overlooked drainage canal in the middle of the busy city.

Malcolm Fortune spotted them behind a pump house. What with the weather, the pumps have been gushing stormwater. The water flows south behind a row of houses, maybe 175 yards, and connects to Fourteen Mile Slough.

And on to the Delta and out the Golden Gate.

"Last Saturday, we went for a walk," Fortune said. "And as we walked by that pump house ... we could see a 30-inch fish. It turned out to be a king salmon."

This struck me as a minor marvel. First, salmon are just plain amazing. They're born in high streams. One day their biology changes, enabling them to switch from fresh water to salt water.

They journey through the Delta out to the ocean. By a process as yet beyond scientific understanding, they are apparently imprinted with the scent of their home stream.

One day they go back.

The migration once was one of the largest on the Pacific Coast, as many as 500,000 salmon twisting in a near-solid mass up the San Joaquin River, following their ancient and mysterious map toward the headwaters where they spawn and die.

Other rivers, too. "Their leaping over the sandbars created a noise comparable to a large waterfall," one record says.

In recent years, excessive water exports from the Delta and other bad conditions so reduced salmon that the commercial fishing season was suspended.

But the fall-run chinook, or king salmon, as Malcolm calls them, are not endangered. Last year, they were spotted in the Calaveras River for the first time in years. Commercial fishing reopened.

I eagerly made for the pump house. Sure enough, big salmon, perhaps 20 pounds, their noses right up against the dead end. Salmon don't have reverse gear, it seems.

These guys were born in the Sierra way up the Sacramento, the Stanislaus or the Mokelumne rivers. Come to the 209 by way of the Farallon Islands and beyond.

Remarkably, they arrived in the middle of the city undetected. There's a bus stop by the pump house, a busy street, a row of homes, the Lincoln Unified district headquarters. Yet nobody, until Fortune, noticed them.

Probably, like me, nobody expected any such thing out of a utilitarian ditch. Neighbors were delighted when they found out, though.

"Wow," Irene Ortiz said.

"We haven't had salmon migrating up this creek ever before," said her husband, Albert. "And I've been here 26 years. It's unique."

"I'll be darned," Ken Fox said. "It's unusual. I go over there all the time to catch the bus."

"To have something like that in this area, it's so funny," said Cindy Hutchins, who works in that Lincoln Unified office. "It's such a small canal."

High flows of stormwater flushing out of the city system evidently created an "attraction flood" that confused the salmon, said Kari Burr, a fisheries biologist with the Fishery Foundation of California.

Burr had good news and bad news. The thwarted salmon will seek spawning ground in the canal and die. Even if they managed to spawn, their progeny will not escape the drying creek.

On the bright side, "It just lets us know how many fish are in the system right now for this to be happening," Burr said.

In other words, the presence of salmon in the city demonstrates their increasing abundance in recent years.

These comeback kids may be blundering up other small Stockton waterways, too. "They could have come into anything that's connected to the Delta," Burr said.

Before you pull out the fishing pole and soy sauce, it's illegal to catch salmon this time of year.

We can appreciate them, though. For all the pounding we've given the Delta, nature's thriving life is surging up every watery vein and capillary, even into the city.